Ánimo abuelos que ya volvemos: el movimiento libertario

The stimuli consisted of a practice text (see Appendices D and E) and two text excerpts16_{, being a news story (Appendices F and G) and a} literary story (Appendices H and I), as follows:

a) Practice Text – Travelogue : “Young Artist Tortured in Timisoara”, by de Volkskrant, 1989, (as cited in Zwaan, 1994);

15 _{‘Control system’ is a term used by Zwaan (1991), which corresponds to the definition of} schema (Rumelhart, 1981).

16 _{The stimuli were two text excerpts because it was not possible to find integral texts with the} features necessary for this study, i.e., being able to be categorized as either literary story or news story, depending on the given instructions.

b) Text A – News Story: “Go to the Theatre and Die”, by Vadim Dubnov, 2003;

c) Text B – Literary Story: “A Stranger in the Mirror”, by Sidney Sheldon, 1976.

The news and literary texts were both authentic (except for the date of the happenings from Text B, to be explained later), having an average of 320 words each. The practice text was partially adapted, having some words replaced by synonyms, in order to facilitate comprehension. It was composed of 245 words.

The practice text was an excerpt of a travelogue, which was previously used in Zwaan’s (1994) study (Appendices D and E). This genre is somehow similar to a travel diary and according to Zwaan (1994) is considered to be between literary stories and news stories. The inferences generated during the reading of the practice text were not categorized, as its purpose was to make participants familiar with the verbalization procedure, necessary for the Pause Protocol. As it was a complex text, some words from the travelogue were replaced by synonyms, in order not to frighten students about the difficulty of the texts to be read.

As regards the actual texts, the main reason for choosing a news story and a literary story to be the stimuli for this study was this researcher’s intention to conform Zwaan’s (1991) and Zwaan’s (1994) studies. Although text type was not determinant in the selection of texts, as one of the texts was integrally narrative, while the other was hybrid, presenting both narrative and expository features, it was possible to find evidence that corroborate, and also evidence that do not confirm findings from studies that have investigated both narrative and expository texts’ influence on inference generation (Narvaez, van den Broek & Ruiz, 1999; Horiba, 2000; Tomitch & Gerber, 2008; and Baretta, 2008, among others).

Although the selection of texts conformed Zwaan’s (1991) and Zwaan’s (1994) studies, the texts selected for the present research are not the same, except for the practice text, as mentioned above. Both texts were selected for having a language level considered adequate for the participants, with a small number of intricate sentence construction (e.g. passive voice, and long sentences) and not containing many presumably unknown words. The topics of the texts were of general interest and it was supposed that the participants would have a background knowledge related to them. Text A was about terrorism,

more specifically about a terrorist act that happened in Dubrovka and the writer’s perspective of the impact of these kinds of acts in capitals and small towns. Text B was about a series of mysterious events that happened abroad a fancy ship as it was sailing from New York to France, and the inability of the authorities discovering what really happened.

As the main objective of this research was to verify whether the expectation of reading a specific genre would have any influence in the participants’ inference generation process, if different texts were used for each genre, the findings could be a result of text specificities, like background knowledge related to the topic. Even with a similar topic, the number of unknown words/ expressions and also the familiarity with the writing style could influence the number of inferences generated. For this reason, following Zwaan’s (1991) and Zwaan’s (1994) proposal, the texts selected for this study had to have characteristics of both literary stories and news stories. In other words, the two excerpts had to be able to fit in both genres, in order to make it possible to verify the influence of the expectation, while ‘textual factors’ were maintained invariable (Zwaan, 1991).

The news story was taken from New Times Magazine, a Russian news magazine. It was related to an act of terrorism in Dubrovka, and it also highlights some topics related to terrorism and its consequences (Appendices F and G).

The literary story was a passage from Sidney Sheldon’s novel A Stranger in the Mirror. The selected excerpt was about some mysterious and bizarre events that happened aboard a French ship, which no one could ever solve (Appendices H and I).

The two texts presented narrative characteristics, although Text A was hybrid, with narrative and expository paragraphs, while Text B was integrally from the narrative text type. Both texts were written in the third person, although Text A (originally the news story) had a paragraph narrated in the first person. Text A also presented some vantage points related to acts of terrorism, while Text B (the literary one) did not present any personal point of view, just the characters’ perception of the facts.

As previously mentioned, although the texts were from different genres, when reading any of them, participants should believe they were reading a literary story or a news story, depending on the given instructions. In this sense, a text was presented to some of the participants as a news story, while the same text was read under a literary perspective by the other participants (see Table 3, page 50). For

this purpose, the instructions given to the participants were different, depending on the genre perspective desired, following Zwaan’s (1991) and Zwaan’s (1994) procedures (see Subsection 3.3 – Procedures for Data Collection for more details).

As regards the instructions for reading the texts, as Sidney Sheldon is a very well known novelist, his name was changed by a random one, Edward Cohen, so that students under the news perspective would not question the source of the text. The year of the publication, 1969, was also replaced by 1999, so that it would not seem so distant from participants’ reality. As news are written stories about recent events, news about such old happenings would probably sound unnatural. Furthermore, more updated students could question the veracity of the news if they were said to be too recent. That is the reason why the date of the happening was substituted by a more recent, but not so recent one.

The texts used as stimuli in this study were untitled, so after reading and verbalizing their thoughts, participants were instructed to give them titles, based on their content and genre. Although it may be considered unnatural, this activity was important in order to check whether students were really focused on the genre of the texts, or just read it without making distinction. As the texts were from different sources, newspaper and novel, it was assumed that if students were aware of it, they would give them titles according to the appropriate genre, instead of a general (based only on content) title.